“Bootlegged” might not be the right term, but it’s a damn sight closer to what occurs in this case than any other. Before I get to the recent doc that includes Media Funhouse footage, though, let me just supply just one story of how videos can circulate amongst fans and eventually can be seen to be “common property” covered by “fair use” (while it’s actually nothing of the kind).
A few years back I was sent on Facebook an image I knew well. It was the former P.O. box for the Funhouse, as rendered using an in-camera titler back in the mid-Nineties when the show was still very new. I asked the friend who sent this screengrab where he got it, and he noted that there was a group on the Torrents that had a selection of public access shows from what appeared to be compilation tapes made by a fan. The odd thing was that the person had labelled the Funhouse episodes he taped “Ed Grant” instead of Media Funhouse. (Thus, I knew the person.)
These clips then began to surface as posts on YouTube by “the Duke Mitchell Film Club” in London. They posted four episodes of Media Funhouse from that benighted mid-Nineties period. The clips I showcased in those episodes are still fun and worth watching, but the actual episodes were definitely skeletons in the closet, as myself and my cameraman friend didn’t know what we were doing back then, so the host segments are way too dark and I’m not using a proper microphone but am instead yelling at the camera’s directional mic.
In any case, a friend of mine who was looking into making a public access documentary noted to me that the clips that the Duke Mitchell people were putting up were indeed taped by him off the air back in the Nineties (thus, the mention of my name on the Funhouse material, since we knew each other back then). He eventually figured out that when he had some of his VHS compilations of access footage digitized, the person doing it had clearly run off copies for themselves and that’s what was now posted on the Torrents and then surfacing on YouTube.
Having seen that Möbius strip in action, I probably shouldn’t’ve then been surprised when footage from the Funhouse appeared in a documentary, without anyone from the production contacting me, even to obtain a better copy of the material. (Since we access producers don’t need money or anything like that, in exchange for our efforts….)
The film in question is the recently released documentary on cult icon Tura Satana. I interviewed Tura for the Funhouse TV show at the Chiller Theatre convention in N.J. back in 1996 and had a lovely time talking to her. It appears my interview is one of the few that addressed on-camera the cult that had grown around Russ Meyer’s Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965), as well as her work as an exotic dancer, her roles in the no-budget genre pics of Ted V. Mikels, and what her plans were at that time with regard to working in low-budget movies again.
Additional context: I had a Mac blog in the early 2000s and was making different episodes of the Funhouse (mostly the interview shows) available for download. Tura’s manager at that time downloaded my interview with her and put it up on MySpace without attribution. I contacted her and asked her to either: a.) credit me with a link to the Funhouse website beneath the video, or b.) take it down. She complied with the first option, and I figured that was that.
But, all too often, a free download signifies to the downloader that the material in question is available to be used in other contexts. This wouldn’t be as annoying if the project the footage was used for is, like the Funhouse TV show itself (and all the work I do related to it), available free of charge. When it’s used in a for-profit enterprise, even a seemingly low-budget for-profit enterprise, it does raise the question of what is “fair use” and what is simply cutting out the “middle man” (read: the owner of the clip) and behaving as if the project in question were a news program that can show clips without licensing them.
What was also annoying about this was (shades of the primitive Funhouse episodes surfacing again on YouTube) that the producer of the film is indeed the same manager who posted the QuickTime file with my interview on MySpace. And she had the filmmaker (whose parents either loved White Heat with Jimmy Cagney a whole lot, or he’s using a pseudonym) use the same QuickTime file of the interview from the early 2000s that looked all right at the time but now looks abysmal. (A computer interlacing effect is imposed on the footage in the documentary so it will further look like “old TV footage.”) Four clips from my interview (with my voice being heard twice asking questions) are used in the doc.
I could’ve, of course, given the filmmakers a better digitized copy of the interview had they approached me and offered some kind of dollar amount for licensing. I’ve done one such deal with a filmmaker who years ago made a Sundance Channel-produced documentary about Asian film and wanted to use a small piece of my old interview with Wong Kar-Wai; the amount tendered was not a lot of money, but it was indeed a recognition that the documentarian legally acknowledged the owners of the footage being shown (and wanted the best-possible copy of the material in the process).
I will note that “Media Funhouse” is included in the credits at the end of the Tura doc, amongst a laundry list of source materials that were used in the film. (Including a few previous docs on Russ Meyer.) A lower-third title with the name of the show (and the year, to establish when the interview took place) might have been a big improvement — but, then again, so would a better copy of the material.
I haven’t contacted the producer, even though she is very easily reached — in fact, we were Facebook friends! At this point I’m sure that the people involved with the production are happy to see their film show up on Amazon and PBS (and possibly other platforms) and are happy to have read the good reviews the film has garnered. I should make it clear: I’m very glad that Tura got her own documentary, she deserves it. Although the way this one is structured, it becomes evident after the first third has unspooled that this would’ve been a dynamite hourlong doc, or even a very good 75-minute documentary.
As it stands, the doc is 105 minutes and basically repeats material by having different talking heads reiterating just how important Tura’s character Varla was for them. We also see reproductions of Meyer’s original poster and other art for Faster, Pussycat! many times. Any time narrator Margaret Cho or a talking head mentions that Tura knew martial arts and wasn’t afraid to mix it up physically with a man, we again see the movie-promo material images of Tura as Varla. (In one of the oddest instants, a different batch of photos of Tura as an exotic dancer is finally shown, via someone literally paging through an issue of the magazine Celebrity Sleuth.)
One other problem is the old familiar “unreliable narrator” dilemma. It is noted somewhere in the second half that Tura spun some tall tales about her life in and out of show business. But elsewhere in the film certain stories that she told about her life are accepted without question.
At the film’s end, we learn (in the biggest, oddest reveal) that Tura’s elder daughter was sired by comedian Marty Allen (whereas Tura told her daughter it was Tony Bennett). It is also stated that her daughter took a DNA test and found that she had no Japanese blood at all, and that Tura’s Asian side was actually Chinese and Filippino. (Which is odd, given that her father is stated to be Japanese — did he also spin tall tales? And why would he have spun that one during WWII when Japanese-Americans were treated like garbage?) This notion is advanced then dropped.
Anyway, despite the film’s padding (including the classic tool of the “we have no photos or footage of that period” doc-makers, namely animation), it is clear that Tura’s daughters and her fans set about creating a Valentine to the “velvet glove cast in iron” that was Varla (and a very noticeable Dragon Lady in Ted V.’s wonderfully ridiculous Astro Zombies, and reportedly a super-energetic and limber exotic dancer).
It might well be that the filmmakers will never make another doc, but it would be *really* nice if they considered licensing footage, instead of acquiring and disseminating it with a laundry-list nod as the only acknowledgment that it all began somewhere else….